January 15, 2026
At the 2026 AIA Annual Meeting in San Francisco, attendees explored a dynamic range of posters showcasing research from around the world. Presented in a visual format, the poster session highlighted the breadth and diversity of work being done across the field.
Three Poster Awards were presented during the Poster Award Sessions: the Best Poster Award, First Runner-Up, and the Student Poster Award.
Best Student Poster Award Recipient: Katrina Kuxhausen-DeRose
“Stone by Stone: The Post-Herulian Wall and the Building Blocks of Lifecycles”
Amid the crises of the third century C.E., the Herulian sack of Athens has long been considered a turning point in the city’s development. However, scholarship remains divided as to the extent of its impact on the “death” of the ancient city. The post-Herulian wall lies at the heart of this debate, since the Athenians focused their efforts on building this new fortification out of the debris rather than reconstructing demolished buildings. Although scholars have thoroughly researched the path and chronology of the wall, there are few publications that address its broader life history as a monument. This project addresses these gaps by formulating a cultural biography of the post-Herulian wall, tracing its changing roles and significance. Drawing on archaeological remains of the wall’s topography and spolia reuse, this study analyzes how Athenians reshaped their city in the wake of this crisis. Methodologically, it employs a processual life-cycle model following the object’s itineraries, informed by anthropological theory, classical studies, cultural heritage studies, and early global studies. The wall’s deliberately restricted circuit redefined the urban center, enclosing only the Roman Agora and Acropolis and excluding other civic, domestic, and industrial areas. Its construction from spolia simultaneously memorialized the destruction and erased the monumental landscape of the classical Agora. This case study demonstrates how the life-cycle model can offer predictive pathways for understanding how reused elements adopt new meanings with changes in form, function, and custodianship. This approach highlights the behavioral practices and object agency at work, challenging the dominant narrative of “decline” in post-Roman Athens. Instead, the city’s urban reconfiguration emerges as a tale of resilience and adaptation, in which Athenians strategically negotiated their heritage to foreground certain aspects of their cultural past. More broadly, this model contributes a widely applicable methodology for interpreting monumental reuse across the ancient Mediterranean.
